- The final lap before it all begins again: Arsenal prepare for new season
- Myles Lewis-Skelly: where is the truth amidst these rumours of him leaving on the cheap?
By Tony Attwood
Sometimes I find myself writing a headline and really wonder if it is worth going any further. And this is one of these times. After all, surely it is patently obvious that managers cannot turn a club around within a year, given that the issue of bringing in new players will involve getting the selling club to agree to let a talented player go. Yet sometimes it seems to me as if journalists and supporters imagine that new players are simply sitting there waiting to be invited to come to another club especially when it is run by an unproven manager. But no – they are on contracts, and the selling club has to be persuaded to let the player go.
And of course there is more to the issue than this – it is the issue of whether the player wants to move, and whether the manager has the talent to persuade a bunch of players who have been failing to take their club up the table, now to do it under different management.
When Emery was sacked on 29 November 2019, Arsenal were 19 points behind the league leaders. And it took Arsenal six and a half years to rise out of that mess; a large part of which involved getting rid of players who couldn’t deliver what the club needed, while trying to raise the money to find all the players the club did need.
And there is a second point. In that season in which Emery was unceremoniously kicked out, Arsenal came 8th in the league, and won the FA Cup. But as the total rebuild of the club took place, the following season Arsenal once again came 8th in the league and were knocked out of the FA Cup in the fourth round. They did however, make it to the semi-final of the Europa.
So eighth in consecutive league seasons – hardly what Arsenal were used to. But then progress began – but it took time as this table shows:
| Season | Lge pos | FA Cup | Europe / exit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | 8 | W | Europa R32 |
| 2020–21 | 8 | Round 4 | Europa S-F |
| 2021–22 | 5 | Round 3 | |
| 2022–23 | 2 | Round 4 | Europa League R16 |
| 2023–24 | 2 | Round 4 | Champions League / QF |
| 2024–25 | 2 | Round 3 | Champions League / SF |
| 2025–26 | 1 | Quarter final | Champions League /RU |
Now it doesn’t take much looking, if one doesn’t already know, to see that Arteta did not come in and reform Arsenal at once. He won his first trophy in his first part-season but then had five seasons without a trophy, and there were calls for him to leave because he did not have a winning mentality.
But the key point here was that although he won the FA Cup early on, winning the league is a tougher ask, and can take a long time. However, at the moment clubs seem to be expecting a new manager to have their team challenging at the top of the league within in the first season. I think we should all be thankful that Arsenal had the sense to hold on to Arteta and not follow the path of Chelsea or Tottenham in changing managers every few months because they are not top of the league.
For not only is winning a trophy in England a tough ask, it can also take a lot of time. And in fact the current high position of Arsenal in English football is due, in my mind, to the fact that the owners of the club held on to Wenger, even when he was leading the club to multiple finishes in third and fourth position, as finishing at such positions was quite amazing, given that most of the club’s funds went on building the stadium.
If you want to see just how extraordinary it was to keep the club in the top four and thus keep them earning Champions League money, take a look at the recent league positions of clubs like Tottenham and Chelsea.
I am hopeful that the building of the extra 10,000 seats (or whatever number it turns out to be) in the stadium does not reduce Arsenal’s ability to keep knocking on the door of all the competitions the club plays in, from the Champions League to the League Cup, as multiple competitions gives people who can’t get a season ticket still to get in to see some games.
But at the same time I do hope the club can hold on to the notion that Arsenal keep on building the club in their own way and don’t try and leap into the ManC approach of spending ever-increasing sums of money in order to try and win every competition every year. For no matter what, that sort of approach doesn’t bring results forever…
